Thursday, 1 September 2016

For anyone unaware of what is happening in Brazil, the president has been formally impeached under spurious charges of "corruption", which in the context of Brazillian politics reminds me of the line in Apocalypse now about handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. About 60% of the people who voted for Dilma Rousseff's impeachment are themselves under investigation for corruption.Basically this is a right wing coup against a popular president with a leftist background but whose coalition government has been in-acting pro-austerity policies. In the local context you could compare Rousseff to Gerry Adams or the current leadership of the ANC, someone who in the distant past was a Marxist guerrilla fighter when the country was under a corrupt anti-democratic junta in a state of civil war but in the intervening decades has made the long journey to parliamentary politics and eventual power through the normalisation of the political process and a series of increasingly extreme betrayals of their leftist principles and capitulations to neo-liberalist orthodoxy, while winning a few minor reforms.

Mug Shot from her Guerrilla days

So basically she's gone from Ché to Tony Blair over the course of her career. But apparently that wasn't enough for the shower of bitter old bastards that make up the Brazillian ruling elite who have never forgiven her for being what she once was and have now mounted what is effectively a coup. These are the same old bastards that were behind the '64 coup, but this time they are using the judiciary and constitutional means rather than the army because an armed coup d'etat wouldn't fly these days.

And it looks like its going to be successful. It also shows up the limitations of reformism. The Workers Party was cobbled together out of a broad left alliance of the old militant left, Labourists and Trades Unions and were generally elected over the last 13 years on fairly innocuous social-democratic platforms and in power never really challenged the status quo or American imperialism in the region and were used as a wedge to beat down other more progressive genuinely leftist leaders in the global south. They never tried to mobilise the masses behind them, create a social revolutionary movement on the streets or do anything about shifting the power relations that constituted the old order.

Which goes to show, the various competing factions of the ruling class and their representative parties, left right and centre, they're all just spokes on a wheel, this ones on top, then that one's on top, and on and on it spins, generating profit for those on top and crushing those on the ground. Our aim should not be to stop the wheel (as the WP tried to do), but to break it.

Wednesday, 22 June 2016

In 2014 when the Scottish referendum happened what could have been a typical politically empty, nationalistic / jingoistic (from both sides) shitty spectacle actually became something more than it was intended to be. The Scottish left and activist spectrum turned it into a real debate, one centered around Austerity and the real fight happening within contemporary society beyond the circus side-show that is political discourse in the UK.

This year we're voting on the UK's continued membership of the EU, and nothing of the sort has happened. The focus of the debate has been skewed from reality of what the EU is and what the member states will be facing in the near future to a lot of petty squabbling and wars of position for hegemony within the Tory party being presented as the breath of the debate. The British left has shown no leadership in terms of getting the word out that, and I know this may surprise a lot of people, there are actually plenty of good reasons for wanting to leave the EU and that you don't have to be a slathering xenophobe to want out. and actually a lot of the arguments for staying are on extremely shaky foundations. The Left-Exit argument has been so marginalised and the Leave position so thoroughly dominated by the right that I am genuinely embarrassed to be voting to leave tomorrow, though that isn't actually going to stop me - it just pisses me off.

I can see that there are plenty of arguments for voting to remain, from the personal fear of what might happen with regards to their pensions, because they do benefit from the EU's internal migration policy, out of spite at the loyalist thugs merrily shouting 'vote leave' as they beat up random people they presume to be catholics (this is literally what happened to people I know) - the fear of a resurgent right capitalising on a Brexit vote is a legitimate one The EU at least recognises Palestine and is its biggest provider of international aid and is at least critical of Israel, though that aid is channeled through the PA and is in no small part responsible for the maintenance of the corrupt PLO leadership over the PA and consequently the continuing divisions within the movement. There's a certain validity to the argument that the EU has provided an amelioration of the excesses of the British political establishment, consensus politics in Europe does tack slightly to the Left of consensus politics in the UK (though even with the Human Rights Act, it didn't stop Section 28, or what what was going on over here during the Troubles). They're right that the Exit camp haven't really put forwards a viable or inspiring vision for an alternative outside the EU, they're right, that would have been the job of the British organised left and they fucked that one up. I honestly wouldn't think less of anyone who voted to stay in tomorrow.

Personally though I can't justify it to myself. I can't not think of Alan Kurdi, and all the other people murdered by the EU's immigration policies. I look at Greece and see the Troika doing to the Greeks what the English did to us during the Great Potato Blight of the 1840s, killing people with the ruthless application of Free market economics to ineptly fix a problem created by free market. Seriously, what they've done in Greece is disgusting, its imperialism pure and simple and I've no wish to be a part of it. That hasn't quite gone down here but at some point should we ever attempt to break in earnest with austerity, it will.

You can say that my position with regards to the UK's position in the EU is abstract or idealistic but I don't see reforming the EU from within as a viable option, Syriza tried that one and got kurb-stomped for their efforts.

So, stay / go, either way its not a great choice and either way the real fights are still to be had. It didn't have to be like this, it could have been a party. Again getting back to my initial point in this post, looking at the way the debate around the Scottish referendum went I can't help but think of how different it might have been. Anyway, in spite of the class-baiting scare mongering in the popular press, its been a foregone conclusion since the start, we're definitely not leaving the EU, the vote will go to the Stay option, though probably by a slimmer margin than expected at the outset of the campaign. None of this bodes particularly well for the future.

Sunday, 24 April 2016

This is a paper I wrote nearly ten years ago for one of the modules on my MA in Cultural History at the University of Essex. In retrospect it is an amalgam of the fairly advanced and theoretical Po-Mo academic culture in UoE and the more straight forward empiricist approach of the Queens University Belfast history department. For the uninitiated, what I casually refer to here as Body History is just basically the academic concept of the human body as a historical subject, rather than say, more amorphous things like the history of a nation, a movement or looking at an individual through their physical experience of the world around them rather than their writings, which would be the typical historians approach. I present it here on the 100th anniversary of the Rising with a few pictures added.

I

One of the advantages of the recent
development of body history is that it can throw into sharp relief a period of
history or event that is quite well known and studied, but not well
understood. As Dorinda
Outram says in her introduction to her monograph on Bodies in the French
Revolution,

“Like a prism, the body has a unique
capacity to concentrate together in the same space…(I)ntentionality and episteme come together and objective
subjective experience can be assessed as something other than simply a
personalised anarchy.”[1]

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/344243965238518340/

In this study what I am attempting to do is to
examine the Easter Rising of 1916 through an analysis of the body in the
discourse around the Rising in its immediate aftermath and much later and the
bodily experience of those who participated in it in order to see how this
analytical technique can better help us understand the complexities of the
events in that week in Dublin, their relation to events elsewhere and their
place in history.

Even by the standards of Irish history, the
Easter Rising of 1916 was an unusual and problematic incident. By turns tragic, comic, heroic, romantic and
farcical, it nonetheless remains one of the key events in Irish history. Organised and instigated by a conspiracy
within a secret revolutionary organisation within a larger paramilitary
movement, doomed to failure from nearly the start, and defying any logic of
conventional revolutionary or military tactics, it nonetheless succeeded in
changing the orientation of Irish history.
In taking the tool of the body-as-sociological-method from Foucault’s
conceptual tool-box and applying it to the Easter Rising, much of what traditional
political and military historians of the rising have found hard to comprehend
becomes much clearer, particularly when viewed within the context of the bodily
experience of the Great War.

The contribution of an analysis based on body
history immediately does three things.
Firstly, implicit in the notion of a social order being based on the
restriction of bodies[2]
is the notion of what happens when the social order is broken, i.e. when the
bodies are in revolt. Secondly it brings
into focus the use of body imagery in the discourse around the rising in both
the propaganda for the rising[3]
and the use of the rising by various parties and movements in Ireland
subsequently. Finally by looking at the
body in the Easter Rising the lived experience of participating in and being
around the rising is brought to prominence.
In this survey I’ll be looking at some of the subsequent events in Irish
history, as well as some recollections of the rising and reflections on the
rising in literature and poetry.

II

To begin with however, it is important to frame
the Easter rising within the correct historical contexts. The most important of these, is the Great
War. This provides the opportunity and
the justification for the Rising to take place.
As much as the Ulster Crisis, which occurred around the Third Home Rule
bill in 1912, had led to a pronounced millitarisation and radicalisation among
the Unionist, Irish Nationalist and a section of the Trade unionist/Socialist
political currents in Ireland before the war began, without the war it is
unlikely that the crisis would have taken the particular form it did. The war also provides an episteme of
conflict, which informed the discourse around the insurrection and the actions
and practice of the insurrectionists throughout the rising. Another major effect of the war on the Rising
was demographic. Because of the war,
emigration was impossible for the large numbers of young men who would normally
have left Ireland in this period. These
surplus (and predominately male) bodies and the unvented male energy were to
have a profound effect on the period[4].

Another important context of the rising is its
place in the tricky historical relationship between Britain and Ireland. Hitherto in the British imagination, Ireland was
considered as an integrated part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland[5]
– commonly embodied, for example in the pages of Punch magazine, as Britannia’s
younger (and feebler) sister. The rising
was the beginning of a process, combined with the electoral victory in 1918 of
those who were either participants in, mistakenly associated with[6]
or at least supportive of the rising, that marked a fundamental shift in that
assumption.

Concurrently in Ireland since the Gaelic
revival of the Fin De Siecle, Irish writers and cultural nationalists had come
to assert a national identity in the form of the Shan Bhan Bocht – the Poor old
woman, also referred to as Cathleen Ni Houlihan. This feminised and maternalised national
figure would provide ample resource for the nationalist propagandists and
polemicists. This worked to create an
image of Ireland as the Mother, a figure that had to be protected and which had
authority over you and to which you owed your existence[7]. In the writings of the insurgents, Ireland is
unfailingly charcterised as female. The
most famous and striking example of this, the fabled Declaration of the Irish
Republic, begins thus;

“IRISHMEN AND
IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she
receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her
children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.”[8](my
emphasis)

The theme is also present in the writings on
non-republicans. One recalls for
instance James Joyce’s famous description of Ireland as

Another important context in which to consider
the rising is the revolutionary tradition.
There is a tendency to place Irelands’ revolutionary tradition as
outside of European revolutionary currents, particularly among popular
histories[10],
on the grounds that Irelands’ unique geographical location and its peculiarity
rules this out. A cursory examination of
the dates of the main revolutionary upheavals prior to 1916 (1798, 1802, 1848,
1867) tells another story as each comes at a time of continent-wide
revolutionary turmoil. Furthermore, the
influence of the revolutionary tradition on the rhetoric of the insurgents is
also evident, and particularly, though not exclusively, in the general
revolutionary mentality concerning bodies and bodied metaphors. For example,
James Connolly’s Workers Republic
editorial of the 5th of February 1916, which ends with,

“…of
us…it can truly be said, ‘without the shedding of blood there is no
redemption’.”[11]

is usually cited by historians as evidence of
Connolly’s descent from more internationalist concerns to quasi-religious
messianism, and generally falling under the influence of Pearse[12]. While this may be true, we should also
acknowledge that it also and certainly deliberately echoes the words of the old
Communard Meillet,

III

Padraig Pearse

So, what was the Easter rising and how did it
come about? The first important thing to
understand is how it was both like and unlike the revolts and revolutions in
the following years, i.e. Russia’s February Revolution and the various revolts
across Germany and the rest of Europe in the aftermath of the war. Nor did the Easter rising occur because of
pronounced economic distress (at least not relative to the usual level of Early
20th century Dublin). Neither
did it arise directly out of class struggle, as in the Bolshevik
Revolution. The insurgency happened
because of the apparent impending success of the moderate nationalists of the
IPP who had gotten the Home Rule bill on the statute books in 1914 just prior
to the war. This home rule bill would
grant Ireland a degree of sovereignty and a parliament in Dublin, but
crucially, would maintain the historic link between Britain and Ireland. To cultural nationalists like Pearse this was
unthinkable. To Pearse, this was an offense against the notion of Ireland as an
embodied entity. In Ghosts, his pamphlet
of Christmas 1915, he says that

“(t)hey have made the
same mistake that a man would make if he were to forget that he has an immortal
soul”[14].

To Pearse the sin of the IPP was denying the spiritual side of the
Cartesian dualism of the nation[15]. The way in which the IPP are characterised in
the pamphlet is again tied in to bodily metaphors, this time about their
manhood;

“One finds oneself wondering
what sin these men have been guilty of that so great a shame should come upon
them. Is it that they are punished with loss of manhood because in their youth
they committed a crime against manhood?...”[16]

For Pearse, they have not been to make the correct analysis and have
been too timid to carry out the true wishes of the Irish people by severing the
link with Britain because having betrayed a realman like Charles Stewart Parnell[17]
they have been robbed of their own manliness.

Pearse opposes this in two ways.
Whereas the IPP were selling the nation short because of their
pre-occupation with practicalities, he would snub the compromising
real-politick of the IPP in favour of actions of symbolic import. Indeed he makes a virtue of his own
impracticality, for example in the poem “The Fool”[18]
(characteristically written in the first person with himself as the main
protagonist) where the fools insistence on squandering years in attempting
impossible things,

is presented as heroic in contrast with the “wise men”, who, unlike
him, for all their wisdom cannot intuitively grasp the power of dreams.

The other basis that Pearse puts forward for his opposition to the IPP
is to invoke the revolutionary tradition in Irish nationalism that seeks to
fully sever the tie with Britain by way of physical force. It is this component of Pearse’s platform in
which we find his richest and most consistent use of body symbolism. This can also be subdivided into two areas.

Firstly, there is the classic romantic revolutionary notion of the
revolutionary as the embodiment of the people.
Pearse’s poem, “The Rebel”[20]
is a classic example of this. The whole
2/3rds of it is mainly just a series of images re-iterating this over again in
intense, emotive language.

“I am come of the seed of the people, the
people that sorrow”

“My mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,
I am of the blood of serfs;
The children with whom I have played, the men and women with whom I have eaten,”

“I am flesh of the flesh of these lowly, I am
bone of their bone”

The poem was written shortly before the rising at a time when the plans
for the insurgency were well under way.
It feels like it would have taken about as long to write as to read and
is as good an example of the mentality of anyone who takes up arms on behalf of
an oppressed people, whatever time, place or for whatever political or
religious cause, as you are ever likely to find.

Interspersed with the theme of embodiment in the poem are the bodily
sufferings of “The People”, that,

“Have had masters over them, have been under the lash of masters, …
The hands that have touched mine, the dear hands whose touch is familiar to me,
Have worn shameful manacles, have been bitten at the wrist by manacles,
Have grown hard with the manacles and the task-work of strangers, ”

While the Poet justifies his actions through his empathy with “The
People” in their suffering.

“And because I am of the people, I understand the people,
I am sorrowful with their sorrow, I am hungry with their desire:
My heart has been heavy with the grief of mothers,
My eyes have been wet with the tears of children,I have yearned with old wistful men,
And laughed or cursed with young men;
Their shame is my shame, and I have reddened for it,
Reddened for that they have served, they who should be free,
Reddened for that they have gone in want, while others have been full,
Reddened for that they have walked in fear of lawyers and of their jailors”

“I could have borne stripes on my body rather than this shame of my people.”

Secondly and in conjunction with this, is the way in which Pearse
invokes the revolutionary tradition by invoking the bodies of the dead
generations of revolutionaries.

It is no accident that some of the most famous
words spoken by Pearse were from his oratory at the graveside of the old Fenian
Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, where he said,

“…the fools, the fools, the
fools! - they have left us our Fenian dead - And while Ireland holds these
graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”[21]

In the pamphlet Ghosts he identifies the
dialectic in Irish politics between the moderate, constitutionalist position,
with which he equates the IPP, and the revolutionary traditions that always
seem to occur as a counter to them[22]. In this, “Separatist”, tradition he puts the
Irish Volunteers, who will be the organisation through which he will mount the
rising and the intended audience of the pamphlet. To persuade them of this[23]
he invokes all the dead generations of men who have opposed British rule in
Ireland from the Gaelic princes who fought off the Anglo Normans through the
Irish and Old English lords who fought the second wave of colonisation in the
Tudor and Stuart eras, the secret societies of the 18th century and
the Republicans from the 1790s on.

The solution to the problem Pearse presents us
with is to have a rising in order to reinvigorate the separatist tradition -
after what was by that time a hiatus from the political mainstream of nearly
five decades - is also bodied. The
imagery he used is that of rebirth through a blood sacrifice. In Peace and the Gael Pearse writes
approvingly of the war and its effects;

“The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the
history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth….

…It is good for the world that such things should be done. The cold
heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. ”

One final point about Pearse’s language of
rebirth is its Christian nature. Pearse,
himself a devoted Catholic[25],
foreshadowed the liberation theologians in identifying the suffering of “The
People”, with the sufferings of Jesus Christ, whose naked suffering body in
virtually all of Pearse’s poetry and political writings. The greatest significance of this for Irish
history was that the Rising was timed for Easter Sunday, the day Christ
symbolically arises from death[26]. It is also clear from Pearse’s recurring use
of the imagery relating to Christ that while Pearse did believe in the
necessity of bloodshed and used the imagery of blood a great deal in his
political and literary output, he was different to others who have used similar
imagery[27],
as unlike them it was always his own blood he was referring to rather than
anyone else’s.

IV

In understanding the bodily experience of the
Easter rising as a revolution, we can adapt Bryan Turner’s model of the social
order as based on the restriction of bodies - through their capacity to
reproduce, the restraint of their appetites, the regulation of their movement
in space and their representation[28]-
as a conceptual framework in which to operate.
When we consider that in a revolution the social order is inverted, and
the measure of a revolutionaries success is the extent to which the social
order is inverted with the eventual aim of replacing it (or doing away with it
altogether) then by inverting Turner’s categories we have a sociological model
of what bodies actually do, or attempt to do in a revolution.

ICA Volunteers on the rooftops in Dublin

The first category of Turner’s model,
reproduction, is challenged and inverted in revolutions through the institution
through which it is most commonly maintained, i.e. the female body. In revolutions the division of labour and the
traditional gender roles tend to be challenged, if not on occasion entirely
reversed. Women have been at the
forefront of revolutions from France in 1789 to the events in Bolivia earlier
this year. Indeed revolutionary periods
tend to coincide with the high-tide mark of women’s participation in politics
and women’s rights.

During the Easter Rising there was a
paramilitary organisation of women, Cumman na mBan[29]
who participated in the insurgency.
Although their role was primarily the traditional female one of
providing support and nourishment for the troops in the form of field they
played an active role in the fighting under dangerous circumstances, running
field hospitals, reloading rifles, ‘spotting’ for snipers, dispatch,
“requisitioning” provisions (sometimes at gun point) etc[30].

In addition, a significant proportion of the
women who participated in the rising were not in Cumman na mBan but were
members of the Irish Citizen Army which excepted women on an equal basis with
the men. Women in that organisation
fully participated in the rising. At
least one of the women who was involved in the insurgency and several others
who may have been innocent bystanders are known to have been killed in the
fighting. Also, of course, was the
famous role played in the rising by the “Red Countess”, Constance Gore-Booth,
the Countess Markievicz. She was a member
of the Irish Citizens Army and the Irish Volunteers and commanded the
insurgents on St Stephens Green, and had the second highest rank of those who
survived the rising[31].

In the second of Turners categories, i.e.
policing the bodies appetites, the inversion of this has less to do with the
action of the revolutionaries than the response of the people who live through
a revolution and usually expresses itself in the looting of shops, off
licenses, public houses and other premises where alcohol and food are
available. In Ruth Dudley Edward’s
detailed biography of Pearse she details such incidents going on in front of
the Rebel HQ at the Dublin General Post Office[32],
much to the consternation of the rebel leaders.
Indeed few historians accounts of the rising neglect to mention the
working people of Dublin being generally more interested in “epic feats of
looting in the damaged Dublin shops”[33]
than actually joining in with the rising.
That the insurgents themselves didn’t loot, and indeed were generally
respectful of the property seized, issuing IOUs for any food seized, in the
uprising, this is probably indicative of the unpopularity of the uprising and
the smallness of the numbers.

The looting is also emblematic of the breakdown
of the next of Turner’s social order model (and indicative that we should not
view the categories as discreet, but rather assume mutually supportive
interaction between them). This category
is also the most conspicuously revolutionary and it is the infringement of this
that generally characterises the action, and perceptions of the action of
bodies in a revolution. I am of course
referring to the restriction of bodies in space. Whether it be storming The Winter Palace,
manning the barricades or freeing prisoners from the Bastille, the momentous
events (at least of the beginnings) of revolution all occur around the
transgression of restricted space. It is
when the immaterial walls that demarcate the boundaries of allowed space come
down and the body becomes capable of going anywhere it is physically able to,
that you know something momentous has happened.

In the Easter Rising, this meant occupying and
fortifying buildings at various sites around Dublin. It meant rending portals in party walls with
7 lb. sledgehammers liberated from the Dublin Dockyards to turn whole streets
into bunkers as per James Connolly’s theories on urban warfare[34]. It also meant an assault on Dublin Castle,
the site of British rule in Ireland since the Plantagenates, on the
morning of the first day of the Rising. Although the Castle remained untaken by the
insurgents, due to their inability to believe that it could be taken as easily
as it appeared to have been, according to some accounts[35],
few historians writing about the rising have missed the historical significance
this would have had had they been successful[36].

Finally, the last category in Turners model, –
the representation of the body. In Turners
model this relates mainly to the clothes we put on our bodies and the social
significance of certain types of clothes.
An example of the most extreme examples of the transgression of the
prescribed dress codes would be the situationists in Post-Revolutionary Soviet
Russia who on occasion would jump naked onto the Petrograd public
transport. More generally, what happens
is that fashions in clothing and hair will shift towards the pre-Revolutionary
fashions of the classes and groups involved in the revolution or the ideologies
that inspired it. Examples of this in
history include the Irish Republicans of the 1790s-1800s adopting the ‘Cropped’
hair of the French ‘sans culottes’, or the Black Power groups of the
Afro-American Diaspora adopting more obviously ‘African’ hair such as
Dreadlocks or Afro-puffs and African clothing like dashikis.

In the Easter Rising the way in which this
aspect of the social order was transgressed was in the use of military uniforms
by the insurgents. Although not
officially prescribed, the wearing of uniforms did have a profound psychological
effect on the rebels. In his autobiographies
the playwright Sean O’Casey[37],
recalls seeing the ICA in their

and for the ICA women wearing the same uniform
as the men signified their equality in defiance of social norms, indeed on of
the iconic images of the Rising is that of Countess Markievicz with pistol in
hand in full ICA uniform of jacket, trousers and knee length army boots.

V

The exercise of the state power over the bodies
of those who oppose it would in the aftermath of the rising play an important
role in its eventual outcome. While the
rising hadn’t been greeted with the enthusiasm or support it’s leaders had
expected, the way in which they were disposed of would eventually do the job it
had been intended to do.

In the aftermath of the rising bodies become
contested grounds, both the physical bodes of the insurgents and the rhetorical
bodies they become. As the rising is put down, the physical form of the
insurgents become forfeit to the forces of order as it is re-imposed. During the arrest and internment of the
leaders of the rising, they found their bodies treated with casual brutality,
mainly by an Irish captain in the British army by the name of Lee-Wilson who
was charged with holding them while they were still being corralled in the open
immediately after the surrender. Among
the privations he was responsible for carrying out on the Prisoners were
ordering the prisoners to relieve themselves where they lay, taking away Sean
McDermott’s walking stick[40]
having the elderly fenian Tom Clarke stripped, ripping of the sling he was
wearing and re-opening the bullet wound in his arm[41].

The most extreme manifestation of the states’
control over the unruly bodies of the insurgents was of course the executions
of 16 of the Rising’s leaders and most prominent figures. These executions were to have a profound
effect on the public reaction to the rising.
Through consciously embodying the mythic tropes of militant separate
tradition, Pearse, as he had intended, created the conditions where,

Nor did it end with the executions. One of the leaders of the rising who had
survived the executions, Thomas Ashe, would die on hunger strike in the
Frongnoch prison in Wales through choking to death while being force-fed, the
first person to die in such a way in the 20th century. The imprisoned insurgents and the other
members of the Republican movement at home would also defy their confinement
through successfully running one of their number as a candidate in a
by-election in Longford.

The indignation of a large proportion of the
Irish and British people at the physical treatment of the bodies of the
insurgents would eventually result in the electoral victory in Longford and the
eventual electoral victory of Sinn Fein in 1918. Indeed the bodily experiences of the
insurgents resonate right into the present.
In his account of the rising the nationalist historian Tim Pat Coogan
almost gleefully relates how Michael Collins would avenge the treatment of the
prisoners by tracking down and killing Captain Lee-Wilson during the Irish War
of Independence[43]. The imagery of the executions[44],
is indelibly seared into Republican consciousness and the hunger strike would
be utilised by different shades of Republicans at various times for the next 65
years. The overall effect was to
recreate a cult of martyrdom around the leading figures in the rising that
would be exploited by the revived nationalist movement in the struggle for
independence, in the creation of the state that came out of the struggle and by
the dissident Republicans who opposed it.

To those critical of the rising, both at the
time and subsequently, the bodies of the participants in the rising would
become, and indeed remain, contested.
For example, in the immediate aftermath of the Rising there was a
pronounced reaction to the transgression of the patriarchal sexual norms. Early press responses to the rising would
continually downplay the role of women in the rising, usually just by ignoring
them and in some reports claiming that male rebels would disguise themselves as
women[45]. The less easily dismissed figure of Countess
Makievicz, a woman in male uniform leading 120 men was used to,

“…emphasise
the nonsense of the rising, denying it any legitimacy.”[46]

In Irish popular culture there has emerged an
iconoclasm as an antithesis to the popular nationalist sentiment regarding the
rising, particularly in opposition to the use of the rising by the state in
imposing its own social order. This
particular tradition begins with the socialist playwright Sean O’Casey writing
only a decade later. One of the series
of plays written about the revolutionary period in the early 20s, The Plough and The Stars[47]
being the first play written by an Irishman to depict the rising. This tradition continues through the rest of
the century right up until the present with two of the most popular and
critically acclaimed Irish books of recent years being purposefully
iconoclastic depictions of the events of the rising – A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle[48]
and At Swim Two Boys by Jamie O’Neil.

In these revisionist depictions of the rising,
one of the main themes is the problematic and sordid reality underneath the
glorious rhetoric of the rising.
Naturally this often comes out in the depiction of the physical bodies
of the participants. In his
Autobiographies, in the passage cited above, O’Casey goes on to describe James
Connolly in his new uniform, and gives particular attention to how he

“didn’t
look well in it for he had a rather awkward carriage and bow legs…added to the
waddle in his walk”[49].

Pearses’ and squint his supposed vanity about
it is another recurring feature in this literature.[50]

Also, in the wider context of the history of
revolutions and revolutionaries attacks on the physicality of revolutionaries
are not uncommon. In his survey of the
French Revolution the Marxist writer and broadcaster Mark Steel notes that most
of the leaders of the revolution were commonly described as ‘ugly’ by bourgeois
historians, often against the available evidence[51],
though O’Casey and Doyle both oppose the Rising from the left.

VI

So what, if anything, was the experience of
bodies in the Easter Rising?

In relation to the body experience of the First
World War the Easter rising stands as both a reflection and counterpoint. Both reflect contemporary assumptions about
the nature of warfare. In what Robert
Kee had remarked on as the

we see how the leaders of the insurgency were
unconsciously recreating the bodily experience of the western front. In this context the seemingly bizarre
decision to waste precious time constructing a trench in St Stephens green is
de-mystified. Also, some of the psychosexual
elements of the First World War are evident in the rising. For example there is a striking parallel
between the association of the exposure of the body to injury and sexual
exhibitionism suggested by some accounts of the war[53]
with the ending of Patrick Pearse’s play “The Singer”[54],
which was finished just before the rising, in which the main character strips
naked before heading off to fight “the Gall[55]”. Furthermore, in its radical nature the space
given to women to women to express their militarism and patriotism beyond the
norms of conventional warfare makes the experiences of women in Cumman na mBan
and the ICA stand out against that of women in and around the conventional
military forces.

Ultimately, the Easter rising represents an
intersection between the physical bodies of the insurgents and the rhetorical
bodies of the Irish Republican tradition.
As we have seen, it was Pearse’s intention from the beginning for a
symbolic gesture to be made to revive the flagging separatist tradition by joining
it to the now. Pearse evoked the ghosts
of those who had almost passed from living memory. By creating the conditions of the physical
annihilation of their own bodies they were able to discorporate and so become
ghosts, reborn in symbolic bodies that would achieve in death what was
impossible in life, thus overcoming the physical constraints of their own
bodies. As the poet Takahashi puts
it,

As much as either Pearse or Connolly would have
been appalled at the Ireland that came out of the revolutionary period, their
actions would shape Irish politics, society and culture for most of the next
century.

Bibliography

(N.B.
Anything quoted from Pearse would have been written initially in Gaelic
and any quotations may have translations that are peculiar to the source, which
are the Garrity book for the poems and Rose Tempany-Pearse’s WebPage http://website.lineone.net/~pearsebaby/ for everything
else.)

[3] Particularly in the language used by Padraig Pearse in his various
public speeches, proclamations, publications and literary efforts.

[4] Indeed thanks to the work of historical geographers such as David
Fitzpatrick this is one of the few areas on which there is currently a
consensus opinion.

[5] In spite of the sometimes erroneousness of this supposition, as evidenced
by the events of the Irish Famine, the experience of Irish immigrants in
Britain and the ongoing popular support in Ireland for various forms of Irish
nationalism.

[6] Specifically, Arthur Griffiths’ Sinn Fein. Although Sinn Fein was the political platform
on which the republicans stood after the Easter rising, Sinn Fein actually
played no part in the Easter rising.
What happened was that in the early witnesses and contemporary press
reports of the rising mistakenly referred to it as a Sinn Fein rising, Sinn
Fein being the largest group of Irish nationalists outside the Irish
Parliamentary Party.

[7] The non-sexual connotations of this are interesting and worth
commenting on. After the demographic
changes wrought by the Famine, particularly after the shift from paritable inheritance
to non-paritable, for those who stayed on the Island the opportunity to marry
young was significantly reduced, compared to before the famine. The average age of marriage shot up as it
became incumbent on the individual to make a good match as the family farm
could no longer be subdivided between the children. In this sexually stultifying atmosphere, as
captured in the works of Joyce, Synge, Brian Friel, and poetry such as Patrick
Kavanaghs’ The Great Hunger, the most
significant female relationship a man tended to have right into adulthood was
with his mother.

[15] Something he saw as intimately bound up with the Gaelic language
and culture.

[16] P. Pearse, Ghosts (http://website.lineone.net/~pearsebaby/GHOSTs.htm)
– The crime referred to in the passage is the betrayal of Charles Stewart
Parnell, who unsuccessfully attempted to pass the First Home Rule bill in 1887
and died four years later after being savagely turned on by many in his own
party after his long standing affair with the wife of one of his lieutenants
was made public. Many of those who were
active on savaging Parnell such as Tim Healy were, at the time of Ghosts being
written, leading figures in the Party.

[17] Who while he may have been as basically constitutional in his aims
as they were, had worked with the Irish people from the land agitators of the
Land Leauge in the Gaelic West of Ireland and the IRB, and has seen the Home
Rule issue as a means to the end of Irish freedom – or so Pearse belived.

[23] They were after all intended to be used to defend the IPPs home
Rule policy.

[24] P. Pearse, Peace and the Gael, (http://website.lineone.net/~pearsebaby/GAEL.htm). It should be added that Pearse’s belief in the
glory of war wasn’t an acceptance of the logic of conquest but recognising the
transformative radicalising power of the war and is more analogous to Lenin’s
desire for the war to become a revolutionary war than the apologists for the
war itself, though some of the language used is closer to theirs in its
religiosity and nationalism.

[25]Though not
so devoted as to follow the actual rules of the Church with regards to
revolution or not to associate with noted atheists like James Connolly or
Anti-Clericists like the old Fenian Tom Clarke.

[26] Though in the event due to last minute complications in the shape
of Eoin MacNeil’s countermanding order, the rising ended up taking place on the
Monday.

[29] Translates as either “Organisation of Women” or “Women’s
Association”.

[30] L. Ryan, ‘”Furies” and “Die-Hards” Women and Irish Republicanism in
the Early Twentieth Century’ pp258-9

[31] The highest ranking survivor, was Commandant Eamon DeValera who was
not executed as he technically wasn’t a British subject having been born in
America. Originally sentenced to death
by the courts martial that tried the insurgents her sentence was later commuted
in view of her gender.

[36] Though according to the statement given by Frank Robbins, a veteran
of the rising, to the Irish Bureau of Military History some decades after the
rising it had never been the intent of the insurrectionaries to capture the
Castle, but to isolate it (A. Ryan, Witnesses: Inside the Easter Rising pp214),
whether this was an accurate description of what happened that morning or
whether he was replying to later criticism of the rising is unknown. What is known is that most of the guards who
should have been on duty at the time had slipped off to watch the Irish Grand
National (T. P. Coogan, 1916: The Easter Rising pp105).

[37]Who was the
general secretary of the ICA for a time but did not participate in the Rising.

[51] M. Steel, Vive La Revolution pp60 – he goes on to add that its
likely that if a revolution broke out in America led by Brad Pitt and Gwyneth
Paltrow, “in a hundred years time historians would write ‘Pitts frame jerked in
an ungainly fashion, his boulbous pot belly wobbling hypnotically with each
malevolent cry of Power to The People, while Paltrow’s straggly unkempt hair
hung menacingly across her piggy nose and obtrusive unaligned eyes’”.